Working on my third BYOC. Already use a Tremolo and the Mighty Mouse which will never ever leave my board

Now I am working on a Large Beaver - Ram's Head specs.

Let's start with what is working:True Bypass, good clean signal when the pedal is offThe Led is workingThe volume, tone, sustain and rotary seem to work: There is some noise and it's getting louder when I turn up the volume, more highs and noise and some crackling when I turn up the tone and more noise and volume when I turn up the sustain...

But... somewhere the guitar signal is lost... I made some pictures, maybe you guys en girls can spot what is wrong... As you can see, I did some of the wiring (V, T, S) on the other side of the board. Many thanks in advance!

Thanks! I did all joints again (and I can already hear a faint sound coming through ) Tomorrow I will redo all the wires attached to the potmeters... with new wires. And maybe on the same side as the components.

I've replaced the 1, 1, 1 and 10uF caps with 30 yrs old caps I had lying around.Finally I have some sound. I might even say it's promising...

But.. the Tone is not doing anything at all and the Sustain is only coming to life at the very end near 3 to 5 o'clock. Volume potmeter seems to work fine.

Before I get some new caps, is this likely to cause this issue? And will some new caps probably result in a working Tone and Sustain?

Not sure those old caps would cause your current problems, but I would replace them with new caps in any case. Electrolytics don't last forever and are generally recommended for replacement after 10 - 15 years of use. If you're sure that they've seen little or no use, they might be OK, but I wouldn't chance it myself.

thisafternoon wrote:

One thing I did notice during building: I received 3 potmeters labelled with an A....Not two with an A and one with a B as indicated in the Beaver Instructions:

Are they the same? Or did I perhaps got one a wrong potmeter and could this have something to do with my problem?

While the B pot (or potentiometer; I haven't seen them called "potmeters", but maybe you're onto something new here! ) is not exactly the same as the A pots, the difference between them is such that it wouldn't cause the problem you're seeing.

The letter in front of the max. resistance rating of the pot denotes its TAPER, i.e. the speed at which the resistance changes as the knob is turned. A pots have an audio taper (also referred to as a logarithmic taper), so named because they respond in a manner analogous to how the human ear perceives volume change. The resistance changes slowly at the beginning of the pot sweep and increases in rate of change as the pot is turned up. At the midpoint of it's sweep, most audio taper pots are only at about 15 - 20% of their maximum resistance change.

B pots have a linear taper; for example, at their sweep midpoint, they will be very close to half of their rated resistance change. So compared to an audio taper pot, they change more quickly to start with, but then more slowly in the latter part of their sweep.

What's important to realize is that for A and B taper pots of the same resistance rating, they will have the same resistance values (within manufacturing tolerance) at either end of their sweeps. The difference is how quickly they change that resistance in between the two extremes.

BTW, I still believe that the most likely cause of your issues is solder joint quality. I still see a lot of blobby or irregularly shaped solder joints, and a number of cases where I don't see solder "peeking through" the eyelets on the component side of the PCB. This latter condition is typical of inadequate solder flow, which frequently results in incomplete electrical contact. And since you're reporting poor pot response for the Tone and Sustain controls, I'd definitely be re-flowing the wire connections on those, both at the pot lugs and PCB connections.

Thanks for your advice... I removed all the blobby joints and did them all again. And replaced the 4 caps with new ones... now it is absolutely dead silent. I can't even hear the pots reacting (in Dutch 'potmeter' is the preferred nomenclature )

Guess I've short circuited the transistors or something ... It is possible to measure them with my multi meter so I'll try that first

The transitors were fine... had to buy a new one because one of it's legs came off while removing it.

I have no idea what to do next.. There is no sound at all when turning the pedal on, whereas I did have some faint noises even some guitar sound through the circuit before. Is there a relative easy way to measure where the faulty component might be? Or if there is a broken wire? I have a multimeter. When I measure voltages I get different values over the board, but that might be perfectly normal?

I don't want to redo everything, cause the pcb and components aren't getting better each time I do them again... Really hope I can get this thing to work.

Or maybe some simple bypasses? Like removing the whole switch circuitry? Any advice would be great. Don't like the idea of buying a new kit - or a different pedal

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